York: The Map of Stars
Book Three
The thrilling conclusion to two-time National Book Award finalist Laura Ruby’s epic adventure through the streets of an alternate New York City.
It was only a few days ago that Tess Biedermann, Theo Biedermann, and Jaime Cruz, along with a mysterious figure from the past, managed to survive an assault on the location of the latest clue in the Morningstarr cipher—and, in the process, made a shocking discovery about their own connection to this one-hundred-sixty-year-old enigma.
Now the friends are divided. Tess and Theo have no idea what the photo they found in Greenwood Cemetery means, but Jaime is convinced that they do, and that they’ve been keeping their own secrets from him. As the city continues to break around them, suddenly solving the greatest mystery of the modern world seems less important than saving their own friendship.
The stakes of completing the cipher, however, have never been higher. Darnell Slant, real estate developer and owner of all the Morningstarr buildings, knows that they hold one last secret: a power that even the Morningstarrs themselves never revealed. The world has rested on a precarious balance of power for generations; now Slant and his shadowy business partners aim to unbalance it.
It’s up to Tess, Theo, and Jaime to uncover the Morningstarrs’ final mystery in a desperate attempt to set things right. The world—theirs, and possibly others—depends on it.
Praise for the series
York: The Clockwork Ghost
Book Two
It was only a few weeks ago when the Biedermann twins, Tess and Theo, along with their friend Jaime Cruz, followed the secrets of the Morningstarrs’ Cipher further anyone had in its century-and-a-half history—and destroyed their beloved home in the process. But the Cipher still isn’t solved. The demolition of 354 West 73rd Street only revealed the next clue in the greatest mystery of the modern world, and if Tess, Theo, and Jaime want to discover what lies at the end of the puzzle laid into the buildings of New York by its brilliant, enigmatic architects, they will need to press on.
But doing so could prove even more dangerous than they know. It is clear that the Morningstarr twins marshaled all the strange technology they had spent their lives creating in the construction of the Cipher, and that technology has its own plans for those who pursue it. And it is also clear that they are not the only ones on the trail of the treasure. As enemies both known and unknown close in on them from all sides and the very foundations of the city seem to crumble around them, Tess, Theo, and Jaime will have to ask themselves how far they will go to change the unchangeable—and if the price of knowing the secrets of the Morningstarrs is one they are willing to pay.
National Book Award finalist Laura Ruby returns with the middle chapter in her epic alternate history adventure—a journey that will test Tess, Theo, and Jaime, and change their lives forever.
York: The Shadow Cipher
Book One
Named one of Publishers Weekly’s Best Summer Reads of 2017
In 1798, the Morningstarr twins arrived in New York with a vision for a magnificent city: towering skyscrapers, dazzling machines, and winding trains, all running on technology no one had ever seen before. Fifty-seven years later, the enigmatic architects disappeared, but not before leaving the Old York Cipher—a puzzle laid into the shining city they constructed, at the end of which was promised a treasure beyond all imagining.In 2017, however, the puzzle has never been solved, and the greatest mystery of the modern world is little more than a tourist attraction.
Tess and Theo Biedermann and their friend Jaime Cruz live in a Morningstarr apartment house—until a real estate developer announces that the city has agreed to sell him the five remaining Morningstarr buildings. If Tess, Theo and Jaime want to save their home, they have to prove that the Old York Cipher is real. And there’s only one way to do that: they have to solve it.
From National Book Award Finalist Laura Ruby comes a visionary middle grade epic set in a New York City at once familiar and wholly unexpected.
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